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How to disable a restriction for mobile internet sharing

January 13th, 2020 No comments

title='Notabene: disable a restriction for mobile internet sharingNowadays some of cell operators have a practice of restricting internet sharing function for smartphones. Usually it’s an attribute of family tariffs which also propose home internet and digital TV. This article will describe how to disable this restriction. The article is only for educational purpose of course, the author takes no responsibility for what you’re going to do with this information.

So, what will we need? First of all is smartphone with internet sharing function and second is macOS based laptop. We will not need to get root access to our smartphone. It’s all can be done with single terminal command.
A little bit of theory for the beginning. How do cell providers detect we’re sharing the internet? The packet structure of IP (Internet Protocol) contains a TTL attribute (Time To Live) which is integer. When the packet leaves its device, TTL value is set to some particular value, e.g. 128. When the packet goes through another router TTL value decreases by 1. This is how cell operator detects we’re using internet sharing. So all we need to do is to make initial TTL value bigger for 1 from its normal value.
Fortunately we can make it with single command in macOS.
But first we need to determine initial TTL value.

The recipe
1. Connect your laptop to smartphone hotspot.
2. Go to System preferences -> Network

Find your current IP address. Let it be 172.20.10.7.
Then the gate IP address in most cases will be 172.20.10.1 (change last number to 1).
3. Next we do ping of this gate

$ ping 172.20.10.1
PING 172.20.10.1 (172.20.10.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.20.10.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=2.165 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.10.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=10.146 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.10.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=3.050 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.10.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1.994 ms

and get TTL value.

4. Increase it by 1 and run the following command:

sudo sysctl net.inet.ip.ttl=65 net.inet.ip.ttl: 65 -> 65

The command requires admin password.

Categories: Apple, Misc Tags:

OS X: Show desktop (Win-D equivalent)

May 28th, 2016 4 comments

It’s been a long time I was suffering from lack of “Hide all windows” feature in Mac OS X. Why is it so important to me? I feel discomfort when there are so many windows on the screen, or tabs in browser, or shortcuts on Desktop, it invokes a panic in me. In order to focus on some problem I need there not more than three windows on the screen. Ideally just one. Five years passed away since I’ve migrated from Windows and all this time I’ve been using very inconvenient workaround – Hide others (Option-Cmd-H) in applications menu. Today I’ve finally found quite acceptable way to hide all windows by one mouse click or keyboard shortcut. Let me tell you how to make it.

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Categories: Apple, Coding Tags:

Convert binary plist to XML

January 27th, 2016 No comments


From time to time there I face a problem how to convert the plist file from binary representation back to XML. This problem usually occurs when you need to extract project plist file from IPA archive and see what’s inside. This is complicated by the fact that the IPA builder (xcrun utility) compresses everything possible to reduce the size of the application, and probably this accelerates application launch. So after I painfully searched the solution for fifth time I’ve decided to store it to my blog.

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Categories: Apple, Coding Tags: , , , , ,

HexLauncher: quick apps launch in Mac OS X

April 5th, 2015 9 comments

The story of this project is taking me back to 5 years to the times when I’ve been just getting started to enter to Apple technologies world, to be more prescice when I was migrating to Mac OS X. As a lot of people I was feeling not too good about a lack of habitual programs and system interface elements. One of such confusion was a miss of Start button equivalent. To be honest I’m still not sure wether the way I’m launching an OS X programs is most traditional (I’m using a Spotlight). So, after few years I deciced to get rid of this disadvantage. Read more…

Categories: Apple, Coding, Creativity Tags: ,

Goodbye, Hackintosh

March 7th, 2014 5 comments

A number of unpleasant moments associated with the malfunction of my Mac computer forced me to write this post. After the planned Maverick system update my Macbook has failed to boot. Gray screen with Apple logo and load indicator and nothing more. I thought I would never run into this problem again since hakintosh times has passed away long ago. For a while I was very depressed and could not realize the reality. I instantly remembered about the verbal boot mode (Cmd-V when power on). I’ve launched the Mac in this verbose-mode and that’s what I’ve seen at the end:
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Categories: Apple Tags: ,

Preparing Apple Push Notification SSL Certificate

July 8th, 2013 9 comments

Today I would like to describe (just not to forget) non-trivial process relating to implementation of Apple Push Notification Service mechanism delivers short messages to users’ devices applications in the AppStore. And I’d like to put actions sequence performed when creating and installing SSL Push Certificate: without this certificate server side is not able to send Push. Also, I’m going to write how to implement the most simple push-server php script. The function itself is very useful to alert users about new system events. Such monsters as Skype, Google, WhatsApp use push technology to make a call subscribers or notify about new messages in the manner of how it does standard iOS apps. Read more…

How to install ttf or otf font to OS X

June 23rd, 2013 1 comment

title='Notabene: install font to Mac OS X
Made a decision to write an article in notabene style. Otherwise I always forget and then painfully recall the solution of this issue I’d like to tell about. And the thing I’d like to about is how to install a font to Max OS X system, e.g. ttf (true type font) or otf (open type font). I didn’t find it in standard Settings App (maybe didn’t try too much:).

The trick is that you need to put font files to special folder which is /Library/System. If system language is not an English this folder may have specific name and look different in Finder app. In Russian it calls /Библиотека/Штрифты. The most difficult thing in all of this is how to get an access to Fonts folder using standard Finder App, because by detault it does’t show a number of folders considering them as system important I believe. So we just need to use standard Go To Folder facility. Just Open system menu of Finder app and choose Go To -> Go To Folder

 

Then piece of cake. Put /Library/Fonts string into spefcial field and press Go To

Copying all ttf-font files, I hope received from some legal source of course)

And voila. The fonts must appear imediately in all system font-dialogs if installation finished OK of course.

Categories: Apple, Misc, News Tags: ,

OSX: restore overwritten files

January 7th, 2013 2 comments


I’d like to share my happiness with you, the happinness related to the triumph of the human mind. Those moments in life there are extremely rare (at least in my one) …On holidays, I worked on a project in xCode IDE, and accidentally (!) completely overwrote one unit that I’ve been developing for two days. When I realized what I’ve done, I felt something very cold inside – my mind began to tear the hair on all parts of the body, evaluating dark prospects and fighting with a terrible feel of weakness. And suddenly, Behold! The panic began replacing with ghost hope born with the thought: actually HFS + (native OSX file system ) is versioning. Read more…

Categories: Apple Tags:

iTunesConnect: storing sales reports to database

May 1st, 2012 12 comments

Recently I’ve faced the problem of populating different statistics from iTunesConnect portal. Mostly I was intrested in getting full downloading statistics. The iTunesConnect portal provides user with ability of viewing and downloading weekly sales reports only for last three monthes and daily reports only for last month which means the oldest stat is simply getting lost. The solution is obvious: we need to create some mechanism which would populate data and save it to database everyday. After implementing main routine we can enjoy with making different decorations such as visualizing and analytics. Besides, we can easily save current application states which can be useful if some of apps are in state of Wating for review.  Read more…

SVN export without client app

February 29th, 2012 No comments

Небольшая заметка об использовании SVN на OS X. Не могу найти нормального бесплатного клиента SVN. Штатный xcode клиент выносит мне мозг, плюс ко всему ограничен в функциях – не может сделать банальный export (скачать определеную папку без своих запчастей .svn). Долго искал аналог Tortoise Repo Browser (по моему мнению – самый лучший GUI клиент), нашел нечто (SCPlugin), но, вероятно, в виду своей бесплатности он очень страшный и к тому же не развивается (последний релиз в 2010 году). Самое на мой взгляд приличное для мак решение – это Versions, но он обладает большим недостатком – ценой)) Чувствую, все-таки раскошелюсь в ближайшем будущем. А пока, для того, чтобы реализовать рекурсивную очистку проекта от миллиона вложенных папок .svn я применил такой workaround

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Categories: Apple, Coding Tags: , , ,